


Here In Oblivion

by EssayOfThoughts



Series: MCU Maximoff Oneshots [155]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Battle, Gen, Infinity Gauntlet, No Bashing, Not Avengers: Infinity War Part 1 (Movie) Compliant, Speculation, Teamwork
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-26
Updated: 2018-04-26
Packaged: 2019-04-28 09:26:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,744
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14446284
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/EssayOfThoughts/pseuds/EssayOfThoughts
Summary: She was tired. Tired of this all. Of fighting, of having to fight, of having to prove, day by day, that she was not a threat.Shewasa threat. She was more powerful than any of them. The power, ever-simmering beneath her skin, flares loose.





	Here In Oblivion

**Author's Note:**

> So this is just speculation, **I have not yet seen the film**. The title - and the prayer Gamora and Nebula use - is cribbed from the lyrics of [_Oblivion_ by Aviators](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ka36MMcxpUs). I also listened to [_Psychoactive_ also by Aviators](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iWLT7vyrDA4), [_Speak In Tongues_ by machineheart](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=09fMLDTPr1w) and [_Bang Bang_ by Green Day](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d44Hga_f59U) when writing this fic.

She curls and uncurls her hands. In her bones, scarlet coils. She can feel it, like love and blood and anger.

“Help us,” Clint asks, bow in hand. One battle already forgotten for the sake of a bigger battle. “Wanda, kid. We barely know what we’re up against here, this Thanos…”

Wanda turns her hands, stares past them to her boots, to the pendant dangling from her wrist now her neck could not bear a necklace without it causing her panic.

“Wanda, he already has three Infinity Stones.  _ Three. _ And he’s coming to Earth for the fourth.” Clint’s hands twist nervously on his bow. “Kid, your powers _ come _ from one of the stones. The rest of us… we’re just human. We have no powers.”

_ Was I treated as human? _ she wants to ask.  _ In the Raft, in a straightjacket, in a  _ **_collar?_ **

This world has taken from her: parents, home, safety, freedom, vengeance, brother, city-home.

Freedom again. Humanity. Human rights.

“No,” she says. “Leave me be.”

 

* * *

 

She sees the new unnerving mind arrive. Metal boots setting down on the grass at the end of her little garden.

“Wanda Maximoff,” says a new voice. “I come to offer you a deal.”

She sits at her kitchen table, a cup of tea in her hands. In front of the alien sits another steaming cup. He ignores it. 

“You know who I am,” he says shortly. “What I want. What I will do. But you do not know, yet, what I can offer you.”

She watches him carefully through mint-scented steam.

“If you help me,” Thanos says. “I will give you back your brother.”

 

* * *

 

Vision’s arrival is almost silent. She can barely hear it as his feet set down.

“Wanda?” he asks. “May I speak with you?”

He has come to speak to her. He is  _ already _ speaking to her. Wanda pegs up the next piece of washing without turning.

“I know you don’t want to fight,” he says gently. Slowly. “You can be vengeful and you loathe injustice but you fight because you feel you  _ must _ , not because-”

“I fight,” Wanda corrects him, “When I am angry or when something is so wrong it must be met with force.”

“And now?” Vision asks. “What of Thanos?”

Wanda sighs, ducks her head, turns. “I am  _ tired,” _ she says. “And every time I have tried to help, I have only made things worse.”

Vision’s hand reaches for hers, gently. “Wanda-”

“My brother  _ died, _ Vision. For a vengeance we never got. I lost my freedom for fighting it being taken from me without warning.” She sighs, turns back to her washing. “Whichever side I fight for will lose something important, or, worse, I will, and I have so little left to lose.” She half-smiles, a small bitter thing straining her cheeks. “I am not ready to lose my life.”

Vision is silent, gaze cast down. “Wanda,” he says softly. “We cannot fight without you. You and I, we are the only ones strong enough and I-”

“You have the stone,” she says. “And he will take it.”

“We need you,” Vision says, earnest and honest. “In case he succeeds.”

He is not looking to see Wanda’s thrown handful of scarlet, her scarlet gaze as she turns.

“He won’t,” she whispers. “I will.”

 

* * *

 

Thanos is sitting opposite her again. This time, there is no tea. Wrapped in a handkerchief on the table the mind stone glimmers and gleams.

“You succeeded.” Thanos sounds surprised. “Even my own daughters could not bring me a single stone.”

“I have brought you one,” she says. “You know why.”

He inclines his head, lifts the gauntlet, three stones already shining in the knuckles. 

“It is simple,” he says, “With the Aether, to rearrange reality on a more permanent basis.”

In the corner Pietro appears, slumped in a heap.

_ “Brother,” _ Wanda whispers in Sokovian, and pushes the handkerchief to Thanos. “My  _ brother.” _

 

* * *

 

“Wanda,” Pietro says, voice shaky. His hands tremble as they cup her face, his fingers shaking cages by her eyes. Her hands cup his face in turn, fingertips pressing into his hair.

“It’s all right,” she whispers. “It’s all right. You’re  _ alive. _ You’re alive.”

At the table Thanos twists the gauntlet, uses a shimmer of purple to settle the yellow stone into its place. He stands, his helmed head scraping against the ceiling.

Wanda rises, turns, Pietro right behind her, still-trembling hands catching her sleeve. “You go to fight them for the last,” she says. “Don’t you.”

Thanos smiles with great tombstone teeth. “I go,” he says. “To crush them.”

 

* * *

 

Preventative measures, that’s all they can hope for. Clint knows this, watching down from his perch, sighting along an arrow at the whirling vortex coming into being. At his side the mad magician stands, his fingers twisting sparks into the world.

“He’s coming,” Strange says.

“Shut up.”

“Please tell me you can see him,” Strange says. “They can’t call you Hawkeye for nothing.”

“Shut  _ up.” _

“If he takes the Eye-”

“Strange.”

He shuts up.

 

* * *

 

The arrow thuds into the ground by Thanos, the power of the portal warping just enough to throw Clint’s aim off.

“Damn,” Clint says, and draws a second arrow.

 

* * *

 

_ Protections, _ Thanos thinks, seeing the weave of reality and time and power before him.  _ Weak ones. _

It takes but a raised fist for them to fall.

 

* * *

 

“Fuck,” Clint mutters. “Go on then, use your mojo.”

Strange throws himself off the roof, cloak flaring to catch him.

 

* * *

 

Far away, Wanda closes her eyes. Pietro paces through the room and, beside her, lain out on the bed, Vision’s still form rests.

“He has the fifth stone,” Wanda whispers.

Pietro stills. Is silent for a moment. “Do you want to fight?”

 

* * *

 

One way or another, Wanda knows, they will have to fight.

At Thanos’ side, against it - but against it risks the gauntlet, risks reality unmade, her brother gone.

“You survived without me,” Pietro says softly. “You could again.”

She could. She couldn’t. It’s hard to say, harder to explain. Pietro paces, slowly, exhibiting her uncertainty, her worry, while she sits in silence beside Vision’s still form. Her fingertips run around the dip where the mind stone used to rest, where ichor seeps, seeking the stone that was once linked to his consciousness.

 

* * *

 

“We’re fucked,” Clint mutters. Even with Hulk back and Thor back and Little Miss Green Natasha and her sister Miss Blue and  _ the goddamn Tony-Raccoon _ he was pretty certain they were fucked. And the tree. The talking tree was not to be forgotten.

“We have to try,” Steve says. He holds the shield in steady hands but his stance is shifting every moment. Beside him Bucky rolls his metal shoulder as T’Challa runs last minute checks. Behind them the Dora Milaje, one woman for every clan and then many more, are gathered, garbed in Vibranium armour as fine as T’Challa’s own.

Strange gives the signal - a single raised hand, not trailing any sparks or sigils - as something flares in the array of magic before him. 

“He’s coming,” he calls.

 

* * *

 

Gamora is muttering some prayer under her breath beside Peter. He didn’t think she prayed to  _ anyone _ , but then wannabe-god Thanos is her Dad and Nebula beside her is doing exactly the same as she checks over her cybernetics. Both sisters praying as they wait for their father the world-render. He supposes praying in the face of that isn’t odd.

“Here in oblivion,” they whisper, fingers running over blades, tools over cybernetics. “Here in Oblivion, between nightmares and sweetened lies. We ask eye for eye, asked hand in hand.”

_ Okay, that’s a pretty odd prayer. _

 

* * *

 

Thanos steps out of the portal and  _ laughs. _

Strange cuts off his exit, a portal between the portal, wrapping all around. No way in to Thanos’ way out.

Thanos smiles with great tombstone teeth.

 

* * *

 

There is too much going on. Thanos raises a gauntlet and in a wave of purple light people are thrown about. Natasha catches herself, Steve rolls, the Dora Milaje and T’Challa land like cats, on their feet in smooth and perfect motions.

Drax and Hulk and Groot step forward, muscles and hulking strength, and flexing timber with weight enough to hold them in place against the shockwave. Tony, Rhodey, Sam and Quill are flying about, trying to gain advantage.

Peter - their Peter, Spiderman Peter - is next to Scott ready to dive forward. Thor is standing behind them, his hand on Peter’s shoulder.

They’re losing. There’s no mistaking that.

Thor’s lightning crackles around him and he lifts into the air.

 

* * *

 

“They’re going to lose,” Pietro had said softly.

She knows that already. As Vision and Clint had said - they’re only human.

Or alien, in the case of some few.

But they are mortal, with mortal powers. Human unaltered, or humanly altered, humanly remade. 

They are not them nor Vision. 

(Vision, lain out on the bed in Wanda’s house, still as the dead, divot on his brow empty.)

“We fight,” Pietro says. “Or they die.”

More than that, really. Clint, who had welcomed her, would die. Vision, sleeping, would never wake. The world would be remade, however Thanos wished it.

She had given Thanos the stone. It was she who had to take it back.

 

* * *

 

How do you fight the all-powerful? How do you win when the fight is unwinnable?

What do you when anything and everything will be turned back against you?

(Wanda knew the answer. You wait for the right moment.)

 

* * *

 

_ Here in oblivion, _ Gamora thinks,  _ may I take my vengeance. _

“Father!” she yells across the battlefield. “Fight me on a fair field!”

 

* * *

 

Thanos’ hand lowers.

“Oh Gamora,” he says, heedless of how Nebula seethes in her shadow. “You know you were always my favourite.”

Her blades sing in her hands.

“So fight me!” she calls. “You knew this day would come.”

 

* * *

 

Thanos raises his hand, gestures to one of the guards gathered around his sides. Soldiers of all kinds - seekers and scouters, assassins and attackers, finders and foulers. All parts of his plan.

_ You knew this day would come. _

Gamora stands before him, all the rage of her parents and her people before he’d destroyed them. All of it just as useless. 

“Father,” Nebula says, stepping forwards, shoulder to shoulder with her sister. In the sun the metal of her scalp gleams. “You trained us for this. Now  _ fight us.” _

His dark army swarms forwards.

 

* * *

 

Gamora ducks, dives out of the way to one side and between the legs of a monstrous six-legged creature. She has no idea if the team behind her will have time to prepare but her knives are slick and ready in her hands, slicing through enemies and slipping from one grip to another as they always have. When she gets back on her feet, shakes the blood from her eyes and casts her gaze around she sees Nebula battling three, the Guardians many more and the Captain standing with shield raised against the shining strike sent from her father’s Gauntlet.

For a long moment, the shield holds.

 

* * *

 

At the edge, at the very brink, Wanda closed scarlet eyes.

“Now,” she said. “There will not be another chance.”

Pietro’s blue was like a bolt of lightning.

 

* * *

 

She was tired. Tired of this all. Of fighting, of having to fight, of having to prove, day by day, that she was not a threat.

She  _ was _ a threat. She was more powerful than any of them. The power, ever-simmering beneath her skin, flares loose.

 

* * *

 

The strike cuts off just as the Captain’s shield is about to crumble, a blur of blue whisking past Thanos and off into the distance, something almost a sigil etched in its wake.

“Strange!” calls Thor.

“Not me!”

Thor casts his gaze around - blue is a colour Loki hates, yes, but it is a colour of his magic when he wishes it, for all he choses gold and green to honour their mother.  _ Brother, _ he thinks.  _ You betrayed us to be my spy. Where are you? _

Then crimson falls like a meteor.

 

* * *

 

The Dora Milaje, the men of Wakanda, the Guardians and all their friends, all the agents of lingering SHIELD that they could find meet the oncoming wave in a rush. They are aliens yes, and monsters, but they are fighting alongside aliens and monsters, gods and more. Vibranium rings out, weapons flare with the lights of gunfire and plasma, and blood waters the battlefield.

And the falling scarlet reaches out.

 

* * *

 

Wanda isn’t focussing on what she’s doing. This isn't’t that kind of battle. This is simple and unleashed, anger and scarlet power, lashing out and reaching, minds laid bare to her scything probes, bodies weak before her scarlet hands. There isn’t focus. There isn’t a need to think. The scarlet, born of her body and the power of a Stone writhes out of her veins, works its way deeper into her bones and responds to the very nature of her will.

_ Find the enemy. Destroy them. _

 

* * *

 

Wanda is held in the air by nothing but her blood-red power. She hovers above the battlefield, scarlet arcing out towards Thanos and all his army. Thanos’ outstretched hand etches sigils in the air, nets of power that disperse the chaos battering against it, but other strikes hit home, and the half of his army still near him is thrown about like ragdolls. Thor flies close, his lightning joining her scarlet against the shield Thanos has put up and then strikes fly from behind them, sigils just as strong, etching weaknesses into the magic they face.

And then sigils of green and gold illuminate the shield from within.

 

* * *

 

Loki’s mind has been a semi-constant state of  _ ohfuck _ since Thanos got the Mind Stone - guilting the witch, making her choose - but now Thanos has the power of Minds once more and Loki hates it, that feeling of ice and crystal over his brain, locking down his will. It is one thing to choose to betray, one thing to betray to spy, but it is another entirely for his mind to be locked down once more.

He hates it. His ice rises against it, and his seidr, clawing at the cage as they had the last time.

He stands in Thanos’ shadow, unable to do much more than move from side to side as the witch’s strikes, chaos and power tucked into beams of blood-red light, are joined by his brother’s lightning and the magician’s sigils.

He yearns to use his magic. He yearns to use  _ any _ magic. Even his mother’s. Even-

And the magic Frigga had taught him - Asgardian, yes, but Vanir as well as Aesir, and the sorceries of Muspelheim fire as well as Jotunheim’s ice - rises to the fore. As the riot in his mind builds to a crescendo the cage around his mind cracks and shatters.

 

* * *

 

Pietro runs. He runs as far as he can, as fast as he can, the gigantic gauntlet held tight. With Wanda on the field Thanos will seek him, seek to kill him, a gift rescinded for a deal reneged, and he will not die now, not after being returned to Wanda. Not after all Wanda’s mind had shown him.

She will not lose him. He will not lose her.

He cannot return to her home. He cannot go to the apartment in Scotland Wanda had told him of. He cannot go to any Avengers Base. 

He runs through Wakanda, through the city, and skids into the lift of the mines.

He spills into Shuri’s lab half shaking into silver and thrusts the gauntlet at the girl who can help end this.

 

* * *

 

Gamora screams a warcry, Nebula’s echoing in her ears beside her and they launch themselves at their father.

At the man who orphaned the both of them.

 

* * *

 

“Gamora!”

“Let them!”

Peter doesn’t turn to the woman who is effectively Gamora but human, but he is very inclined to swear. He aims around Gamora and her sister, taking out everyone who would try to be in their path while the Widow shocks two aliens into comas and snaps the neck of the third.

 

* * *

 

_ Loki. _

“Witch!” he calls, his lightning still following the path of her scarlet. “Find my brother’s mind! He can help us!”

Wanda’s eyes are nothing but scarlet, blood but for the fact they are glowing. The red is eking its way along her veins, illuminating herself from within as the scarlet pours out of her - hands and heart and head and shoulder blades - but he feels as her scarlet curls along the edge of his mind, feels the assent she gives.

 

* * *

 

Valkyrie is very much Done with battles after this. Really. Starting a rebellion, killing the Goddess of Death (finally) and now this? She wants a break.

The thing in front of her screams, tar-black skin stretching back around needlepointed teeth and she shoves her sword through its throat before shooting it in the chest with a sonic pistol.

_ Symbiotes. _

She pulls the spiderkid back from touching it, pushes him towards the Captain and the guys in armour, and double checks her clip. 

With Loki’s magic lighting up the far side of the battlefield she continues to fight.

 

* * *

 

Shuri is rushing around her lab, pulling tools from tables to pry stone after stone from the gauntlet and locking them away.

The last, shining like honey and pus, gold and mould, she pries loose.

“Are you ready?” she says to Pietro. “This will not be pretty.”

Pietro jerks a nod and the stone is set back into Vision’s brow.

 

* * *

 

He sleeps. He  _ dreams. _ He’s never dreamed before. Or… maybe when he was being made, his body a sleeping thing of this and that, his mind forming slowly from whatever instincts are born into a body made  _ tabula rasa _ on purpose and the mind of Ultron and the code of JARVIS. He hadn’t had dreams like this. Fantastical pieces of happiness he knows must be false, agonies of pain he knows cannot be real.

Dreams of nothingness and everything, of places seen and unseen.

Then pain lances through his brow and he  _ screams. _

 

* * *

 

Thanos is pinned. Loki has cast some chains around his ankles - of ice and of fire, of gold and of green and growing things. Not sigil-magic or the magic of a hell-realm but the mingled magic of one of mingled heritage, Aesir, Vanir, Jotun and more and bound into being with fury and vengeance. Scarlet batters him, and lightning, etching fire into his flesh, deepening scars already ancient. Across the field his army is slowly being slaughtered by the man he’d tortured for the Time Stone, and far more allies than he’d dared to dream of.

A true fight. A proper fight. 

He’s not had one in centuries.

 

* * *

 

Pietro sprints over sand and soil, beneath where Vision flies. When Vision had finished phasing in and out of the world he’d offered to carry him but Pietro carries Shuri in his arms, her hands covered with cat-faced gauntlets of her own. 

“Teach them to mess with my brother,” she says and Pietro cannot help but agree.

“They fight my sister.”

He slows to a halt at the edge of the field and watches Vision fly straight at the man who almost killed him.

 

* * *

 

“Tony,” Rhodey says. “I really hope you have some more ideas.”

FRIDAY is already sending more armour modules down, encasing the exposed half-numb skin of his legs, filling in the flawed case of Hulkbuster as Tony pins down five of Thanos’ soldiers with one hand.

“Rhodey,” Tony says. “Who do you think you’re talking to?”

 

* * *

 

Steve’s shield strikes out, the sharp edge worked in by Shuri undulled by all the blood. At his side Bucky fights on, flesh and blood caught in the fine panels of his new arm.

There is a half-moment of peace, the enemy ever more thinned and Steve scans the field, Bucky panting beside him.

“Buck?”

“I’m fine. Sam?”

“Hard to do shit when there’s Wanda and Thor in the sky.”

“Sad about sharing your playground?”

The snark is refreshing, freeing. Steve raises his shield, wishes he had his old, and meets the next wave.

 

* * *

 

Vision flies. Wanda hovers above the battlefield held up by nothing but scarlet power, Thor is hovering beside her, lightning crackling from his skin. Rhodey and Sam fly lower, taking out the increasingly scattered remnants of Thanos’ army and two women one each of blue and green stand at the giant’s feet attacking him and attacked in turn.

Vision does not stop. He flies into Thanos, and grips the titan’s heart.

 

* * *

 

“Shuri!” T’Challa calls. “What are you-”

“I’m helping!”

She’s already helped, really, but she’s helping more. There are only a scattered few left but she will not leave her brother and her friends - Okoye, Ayo, Nakia and Nareema - to fight on alone if she can help.

She charges her gauntlets, aims, and takes off a creature’s head. 

“I want these in my lab after,” she says to her brother. “If you’re fighting these you’ll need to know how.”

 

* * *

 

_ Hold him, _ Wanda sends to Loki.  _ Not just his feet. _ Her scarlet is already coiling as Thanos begins to thrash and Loki’s green-and-gold follows her, weaving enchantments she knows not how to make. They fall from Loki’s hands, cut themselves off from him but remain without weakening.

Wanda’s flood of scarlet is fading to a trickle but she does not need to hold on much longer. She can feel Vision’s mind, bright and glowing once more, feel all his confusion and anger and love for the people at the other end of the field, and she can feel the weight of Thanos’ heart in his hands as he holds it, and stills it, and tears it free of the titan’s chest.

 

* * *

 

Gamora’s swords are in Thanos’ leg and wrist, seeking arteries. Nebula is at her sister’s side, so much purple blood on her it is hard to tell where the blood ends and her blue skin begins. Vision kneels between the fallen titan’s feet, the huge heart held clutched in his magenta hands. With Thanos gone, the army thinned to barely a scattered few, Loki steps out of the titan’s shadow, meeting his lightning-cloaked brother in only a few steps. 

Wanda touches down and almost stumbles, but the blue blur from earlier shimmers into stillness, the blue wake of his path fading - almost the shape of a sigil - as Pietro Maximoff catches his sister.

“I think,” Steve says. “Everyone has a lot of explaining to do.”

 

* * *

 

**Author's Note:**

> I hope you all enjoyed this! Please leave comments or [come talk to me on tumblr](http://essayofthoughts.tumblr.com/)!


End file.
